17 Ways to Murder an Idea
Roger Neill
Synectics Corporation
A few years
ago, one of my colleagues wrote an article entitled: Why are marketing people
the enemies of innovation? It certainly did not make him popular but it
remains an intriguing question. One reason is that the churn, the endless
treadmill of marketing executives from one assignment to the next, seems faster
and faster. One of our major multinational clients calculated that their
marketing managers spend on average nine months in a particular role before
moving on. Another possibility is that marketing folk have assumed that they are
the custodians of creativity in their organisations yet so often they seem
most skilled in killing off new ideas at birth.
In a survey conducted by Synectics amongst senior and
middle managers in the USA, over 80% thought that innovation was a top priority
and yet less than 10% thought that their organisations were good at it. This
is an extraordinary, perhaps unique, dislocation what we call the
'Innovation Gap'. What is needed is exactly the opposite a wholehearted
commitment from marketers to getting the most in terms of creative potential
both out of themselves, and their colleagues in all other areas of the business.